


Bob's Your Uncle

by skulls_and_stripes



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Abusive Jasper/Lapis Lazuli (Steven Universe), Alternate Universe - Human, Gen, Murder-Suicide, Pearl's POV, Second person POV, Unrequited Pearl/Rose Quartz - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 09:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21251216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulls_and_stripes/pseuds/skulls_and_stripes
Summary: The story of how the ocean swallowed Lapis and Jasper, and left only malachite in their place.





	Bob's Your Uncle

**Author's Note:**

> the thought process behind this fic was literally:  
-hey, pearl is canonically steven's adopted mother, right?  
-and ive seen a couple human au fics where pearl and lapis are sisters  
-which would make lapis steven's aunt  
-which means the "no prob, bob" joke could turn into someone saying "bob's your uncle" and steven saying "actually she's my aunt and her name is lapis"  
-but wait...  
-...what if it had ANGST?

Steven picked up the ukulele scarily fast. He was a natural. It felt like he was composing his own songs within minutes of picking it up, homophonic compositions with a complex melody and chord progression by age six.

He wrote his first song before he knew how to play a G Major chord.

His father showed him, using his own ukulele as a model. Steven was scarily good at copying the fingering.

“So, you just move your finger to that fret, and Bob’s your uncle!”

“Actually,” he said with childish innocence. “her name’s Lapis and she’s my aunt.”

You almost cried right then.

* * *

You were extroverted at first, but it took about two minutes for your primary school bullies to stamp that out of you.

You came into your first day of Kindergarten as that kid. The annoying, over-enthusiastic teacher’s pet. The one that openly and unashamedly snitched on other kids for breaking the tiniest of rules, even when they weren’t harming anyone.

You learned to shut up soon enough, and by middle school all of your enthusiasm was gone. You were a different type of teacher’s pet now, motivated not by genuine interest but instead by blind perfectionism, by a desperate need to get the top marks, to get a hundred percent on every test.

You were shy and unpopular in middle school. Your efforts to be popular through feigned extroversion failed within days, and so you gave up on them. Your only friend was the nerdy, triangular-haired blonde girl in the year below you. You became the girl that ate in the library by herself, drowned herself in her studies, and had no friends.

You might have given up on actually trying to be popular within two weeks, but that didn’t mean you didn’t still yearn for the connection.

You felt lonely throughout your entire school career, and you lacked the perspective to realise that the friends you made in middle school weren’t important -- that being unpopular was a good thing if it meant your friends weren’t gossiping about you, that within ten years you’d be lucky if you remembered a single name. You hated your status.

You hated your sister.

You were twins, not that anybody knew it. She had darker eyes, darker skin, and notably blue hair.

You hated how popular that made her. She was introverted, just like you, except without your fear of rejection; it wasn’t that she had given up on making friends, she just never cared in the first place. When she dyed her hair blue, it was a choice she made entirely for herself, and everyone loved it.

She didn’t even do her schoolwork, and seventh-grade you thought that doing your schoolwork and acing your tests was the key to being a good person, which in turn was the key to being popular and well-liked.

God, you were naive.

As the two of you started preparing for high school at the end of eighth grade, you made a choice.

You would be well-known. Whether it was for good or for bad, you would be more well-known than your blue-haired sister. People would walk up to her and say, “Are you Pearl’s sister?” instead of the other way around.

You were convinced you would overshadow her.

You were wrong.

* * *

You quickly made your mark in high school as a straight-A student, and your constant awards made you somewhat well-known. Well-known enough to be asked out at around the same time as your blue-haired sister.

By another set of twins, no less. It was almost too uncanny to be real. These ones were fraternal twins, though, so you couldn’t ramble about how your children and Lapis’s children would be biologically cousins but genetically siblings.

Lapis’s first girlfriend was a huge brute of a girl named Jasper Quartz, with vitiligo-induced stripes and bleached hair. Your preferred choice was her shorter, fatter sister, with lavander hair and constant dress code violations.

It took you about three weeks before you decided that you and Amethyst were better off as friends. It was nothing personal -- just that the two of you clashed in a way that made any sort of romance difficult, since you could only be together for two minutes without fighting if your mutual friend Garnet was there to defuse the tension.

Also, you had a massive crush on a senior girl named Rose Diamond, and no matter how much Lapis told you it would never work out, you were convinced it was a possibility.

Lapis and Jasper lasted longer. You never thought it was possible for relationships started in freshman year to continue throughout high school, and you hated it.

Partially because you were jealous, and partially because of the cognitive dissonance. You still had some ridiculous idea that the school rules dictated someone’s morality, and that breaking a dress code was morally wrong. It was hard enough to deal with Amethyst’s constant tank tops and leggings, totally breaking the dress code rules, not to mention the skipping class and neglecting homework. But Lapis and Jasper were another story entirely.

Lapis was always a bit of a delinquent. She was the sort of girl that skipped class for the first time in middle school and smoked her first cigarette at age fourteen. You were there at the time, and you filmed her coughing as future blackmail. You threatened to tell your parents.

You never did.

But Jasper made everything worse. Lapis’s delinquency was mainly limited to curiously trying new things, investigating what it feels like to smoke and skip class, harmless pursuits. If anything, you were glad she chose to be rebellious in eigth grade and get it over with, before things got important in high school.

Once she was dating Jasper, everything changed.

She never showed up to the classes you shared with her, and judging by the yelling you overheard when you were reading in your room, she didn’t show up to many other classes either. She swore in every other sentence. She started wearing crop tops in school, even more blatant dress code violations than Amethyst.

More importantly, she got suspended so many times you’re surprised she wasn’t expelled.

The first time was for swearing ruthlessly at a teacher who caught her skipping class to make out with Jasper in the bathroom. The second time was for punching a guy in the face. The third time was for smoking on school grounds. Most of them were for getting into fights.

The time you remember most clearly, from the yelling you overheard from your bedroom, was the time she was suspended for bringing a knife to school.

She refused to say whether she intended to use it. She refused to say what she intended to use it for.

It was a miracle she graduated after that.

She spent the entirety of her senior year making up for missed work, piled up through three years of skipping, and you still weren’t satisfied.

You were so, so selfish then. You own sister, your twin, your own flesh and blood, was being suspended near-constantly, once for bringing a weapon to school. And the thing you were most concerned about wasn’t her mental health, or her girlfriend being a bad influence on her, or her future after graduation.

It was the fact that you weren’t overshadowing her.

Any reputation you gained as a straight-A student was quickly overruled by her reputation -- as Jasper’s girlfriend, as the girl that smokes on school grounds, as the blue-haired girl, as the girl constantly being suspended for fighting, as the girl who brought a knife to school.

You hated it. You hated that people heard your full name and said, “Oh, you’re Lapis’s sister!” instead of the other way around. You hated that their association with the surname Waters was not the straight-A student with perfect ginger hair and a million awards, but the blue-haired delinquent that may or may not have planned to stab someone during school hours.

You hated it. You still do.

* * *

Your parents had a gem naming theme. So did Jasper and Amethyst’s parents. Garnet was named for a particularly obscure type of gem, inspired by her two moms, named Ruby and Sapphire.

Getting gifts for each other was never difficult.

It grew tiring when it came from others -- you’ve heard enough “haha, a pearl for Pearl” jokes from people that genuinely think they’re the first to come up with the idea to last a lifetime, and all of the “pearls” were plastic anyway -- but between your close friends, it was a sort of tradition. An inside joke.

A very expensive inside joke.

By the time high school ended, you had a million pearl earrings, bracelets, necklaces, anything people thought would be a good gift. Your personal favourite was a turquoise headband with a pearl right in the centre. Amethyst mainly wore her namesake as a necklace that was only half-hidden by the tank tops she wore. Garnet had two bracelets she always wore, each with garnet gems in them, and two rings, one with a ruby and one with a sapphire.

Lapis and Jasper had almost the opposite idea, as an inside joke. An even more expensive inside joke.

It was a “joke” in the same way that saying “I’m a poet and I’m not even aware of it” is a joke -- the punchline is the lack of punchline, or rather the fact that the obvious joke is ignored in favour of a nonsensical one. They made a point of getting any gems for each other except the obvious choices of jasper and lapis lazuli.

It started when the “lapis lazuli” Jasper got on eBay turned out to actually be aquamarine. Lapis retaliated with a carnelian. Jasper got a pearl, Lapis got an amethyst. Jasper got a yellow diamond, Lapis got a blue diamond, Jasper got a pink diamond, and they both became bankrupt.

The gem-giving tradition died out quickly between them.

The last gem Lapis ever gave Jasper was a triangular, lime green type. You could never agree on what to call it. You said it was olivine, Lapis said it was peridot. You suspect that they were just different names for the same rock and it never mattered.

The last gem Jasper ever gave Lapis was an odd, ugly green and white thing, that had to be kept in a protective seal due to its toxicity. It was called malachite.

That was the last gem Lapis recieved, and she never got to make jokes about wearing her namesake.

* * *

Nobody would have thought she could take Jasper down.

Even though she left a note, the police were skeptical. Possible explanations varied from it all being an elaborate plan by Jasper to avoid being portrayed as a villain, to the real perpetrator being a third party.

You were the only one who believed the truth. You still are.

* * *

Things, somehow, did work out with Rose Diamond, the girl who was a senior while you were a freshman. You never dated -- you never really got over your crush, but by the time you were old enough for the age gap to not be creepy she was taken -- but you were close friends.

She met a man. Named Greg.

She died in childbirth.

You were in your twenties at the time, and you had to admit, you did like the idea of having kids. And so did your friends Garnet and Amethyst. And Greg was poor and living in his van, no condition to be raising a child.

So the three of you adopted Steven Universe.

It was an odd set-up, what with the whole three-mothers thing, but it worked. Steven was four when he met his aunt Lapis, and everything went downhill.

Jasper hated Rose. More importantly, she hated Steven.

You hadn’t seen Lapis in a few years, and it seemed things had gone downhill with Jasper. They had been dating for eight years now. Judging by Lapis’s increasingly unusual behaviour throughout the relationship, you doubt any of those years were good.

Lapis loved Steven. She was never a big fan of you, or Rose, or anyone, but she loved that baby.

Steven caused more fights between the two than anything else combined. Jasper would kill him at the first opportunity. Lapis would give her life for him.

You mean that literally.

* * *

The time she was suspended for bringing a knife to school was a confusing one. How did she think she would get away with it? More importantly, why?

She said she didn’t intend to use it, but that was a weak excuse. Why bring a knife if you don’t intend to use it?

You knew she wanted to hurt someone, and the thing that knawed at you ever since that suspension was the question of whether she wanted to hurt herself or Jasper.

It was too late that you realised that maybe she wanted to do both.

* * *

Jasper was banned from seeing Steven, after her frustration at the four-year-old’s tantrums caused her to snap. She punched him. She roared insults at all of you -- she called Garnet’s mere existence a shameless display, she called you lost and defective, she called Amethyst a puny runt. She got into a physical fight with Garnet. She insulted Garnet’s moms.

It wasn’t hard for the three of you to agree to ban her from your house.

Lapis came alone, and she came less and less as time went on. She loved Steven, but she spoke of Jasper’s jealousy. Of her unfounded belief that Lapis cared more about Steven than her. Of some fear that Lapis would break up with Jasper to spend more time with Steven.

On one hand, the idea that anyone would break up with Jasper for a four-year-old was a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, you felt like maybe Lapis should do what Jasper thought she would do.

Lapis refused. She loved Jasper. More than she loved herself.

She said with a humorless laugh that Jasper would kill Steven one day. You never found out if she was joking.

* * *

You found her note in your mailbox at five in the morning, when you checked it as you always did. It was in a plain white envelope, containing a gem Jasper had given her and a letter. Saying that Jasper was going to kill Steven. Saying that Jasper and Lapis were insane, that they needed each other to keep the other stable, that the only way to keep Steven safe was for them to both leave.

You suspect that there were other ways to keep Steven safe -- call the police, move away from Beach City, get Jasper in counseling to deal with her anger issues.

You suspect that Lapis was just suicidal and in need of a good excuse.

You called the police immediately, and despite the note, you were a suspect. It took weeks for them to accept that either the note was real or it was just another unsolved mystery.

They found their bodies in the ocean.

You’re impressed that Lapis managed to take her down, honestly.

It made national news. It’s not every day that someone manages a murder-suicide of someone much larger than them by brute force. Lapis Waters became famous, and you once again became nothing but Lapis’s sister.

It was more painful now. Being asked “Oh, you’re Lapis Waters’ sister?” in primary school just meant you had the bad luck of being with a teacher who taught your sister before they taught you. Being asked the same in middle school meant the teacher was about to go and ask Lapis why she wasn’t more like her sister. Being asked the same in high school meant you were about to have to explain that no, you weren’t like her, and no, you don’t know what was up with the knife.

Being asked the same now? It meant that you were about to be forced to explain exactly what happened. It meant you had to swallow your grief to satisfy their curiosity. It meant you had to assure them that you weren’t “deranged” like your sister when all you wanted to do was say that she wasn’t deranged.

You wear the necklace every day now. It’s ugly, and you’re worried about the toxicity and the possibility of Steven breaking the seal, but she wanted you to have it. That’s why she put it in your mailbox with the note. Your parents were her next of kin, so all of her possessions went to them. It’s your last piece of her.

On that fateful night when Steven was four, Lapis became convinced that it was her repsonsibility to save him, and that there was only one way to do that.

On that fateful night, Lapis and Jasper were swallowed by the ocean, and you were left with nothing but malachite.


End file.
